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The terrible, terrible tragedy in Newtown, Conn., has ignited a national discussion about gun control. My immediate response is to seek out data -- what do we know, what can we know. Many of the questions that are being asked about guns and violence -- do more guns mean more deaths? more massacres? do guns prevent crime -- should be answerable by good science. This is a first look at some studies and data points that I have found that provide some factual traction in the debates that are going on. In this post, I'm going to try to at focus on sharing data and research and evaluating its strengths and biases, without drawing too many of my own conclusions.

Research has found, for example, that higher rates of household firearms ownership are associated with higher rates of gun suicide, that illegal diversions from legitimate commerce are important sources of crime guns and guns used in suicide, that firearms are used defensively many times per day, and that some types of targeted police interventions may effectively lower gun crime and violence.

The chapter on patterns of firearm use in the U.S. and the dissent and counter-argument about whether right-to-carry laws decrease crime or not give a pretty good grounding in how messy these data are.

There is less gun violence than there used to be. This graph from the National Institute of Justice shows there were many more gun homicides in the early 1990s than there are today.

Guns kill more people by suicide than homicide. These data are widely cited, but I'm going to grab them from a piece by the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine. They also see guns as a public health problem, a viewpoint that does mean they favor gun control. The editorial accompanied a similarly opinionated piece in the journal, which is worth reading for history and for its references. But here are the facts on guns and deaths:

Firearms were used to kill 30,143 people in the United States in 2005, the most recent year with complete data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.1 A total of 17,002 of these were suicides, 12,352 homicides, and 789 accidental firearm deaths. Nearly half of these deaths occurred in people under the age of 35. When we consider that there were also nearly 70,000 nonfatal injuries from firearms, we are left with the staggering fact that 100,000 men, women, and children were killed or wounded by firearms in the span of just one year.

For more perspective on those numbers, here is the annual list of the leading causes of death from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While guns do represent a leading cause of death, particularly in young people, in terms of total numbers of deaths they rank below liver disease but above Parkinson's or HIV.

The Harvard School of Public Health has a long list of publications on guns and homicide and suicide. Most make the argument that reducing the number of guns would decrease the rate of both suicide and homicide, so it is worth reading them with that in mind.

Australia's 1996 decision to regulate some types of guns keeps coming up on both sides of the discussion. This article from FactCheck.org gives good perspective on why the data don't show any increase in homicides as a result. The data may show a decrease in homicide, but are not clear. However, there have not been new gun-related massacres.

Wapo's Wonkblog has a great roundup of facts about gun control. I'd skip the introduction, but make sure to read the correction.